The outcry was immense – and intense – in some parts of Twitter and Facebook, and covered widely in the press, which expressed equal outrage. But Google’s search results suggest it ultimately may not even matter.

Before Ryan, the Republican nominee for vice president, even took the stage, the Romney campaign had figured that out that it can get away with, and even benefit from, playing fast and loose with the truth. A week ago today, one of Romney’s pollsters said: “We’re not going to let our campaign dictated by fact-checkers”.

That cynical approach seems to be supported by search activity during Ryan’s polarizing pronouncements. At a panel discussing social media’s impact on the 2012 election at the Democratic National Convention here in Charlotte yesterday, Google spokesman Daniel Sieberg pin-pointed three spikes in Google’s search traffic during Ryan’s speech. Search activity surged when Ryan mentioned his mom (“to this day, my mom is my role model”), when he talked about his playlist (“my playlist starts with AC/DC and it ends with Zeppelin”), and when he mocked Obama’s tired slogans (“Now all that’s left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired”).

None of those utterances, you might notice, had anything to do with policy issues. None addressed a specific criticism of the President (being “adrift” is typical of the effective vaguery used in political speeches). And none showed off Ryan’s supposed mastery of legislative detail. Instead, they are statements that belong firmly in the realm of emotion. They help build a sense of character and biography while also taking down the opposition – which I guess is half of what a good political speech should do.

The search traffic during those moments proves that many people are more interested in the overall feel of the speech than its actual political import. All Ryan needed to do was glue a sense of “truthiness” to his autobiography and – voila! – 20 million viewers, a poll bump, and the love of his constituents.

Such sentiment was more difficult to measure before the age of social media. Twitter’s Adam Sharp said yesterday that in this election cycle we’re able to measure “natural conversation” for the first time – conversation that otherwise would have been confined to coffee shops and office water coolers. In that era, we had to rely on the mainstream media for political narratives. This time round, the data from the likes of Google and Twitter show that the conversation the press is having is often out of sync with what’s going on in the wider world.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]